Kuchma to face pressure in Ukraine death probe
Ukraine’s interior minister gave the new government’s sharpest warning yet to former President Leonid Kuchma today, saying he has reason to worry as the investigation into a journalist’s death nearly five years ago proceeds at a breakneck pace.
Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko said that the apparent suicide note left by Kuchma’s former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko “placed all the dots over the i’s”.
“I personally think that General Kravchenko’s death is an acknowledgement of his guilt,” Lutsenko said. “When a person is prepared to stand before God, he doesn’t lie. That’s why such great importance is placed on his suicide note.”
Lutsenko said that now “the former President Kuchma, who is named by the deceased general, already can’t look people in the eye with a clean conscience”.
Kravchenko was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, hours before he was expected to appear before prosecutors probing Heorhiy Gongadze’s 2000 murder. Authorities have called the death a suicide and said Kravchenko left behind a note attacking Kuchma.
Kuchma has denied all allegations against him, and yesterday he voluntarily went the Prosecutor General’s Office in Kiev for questioning.
Kuchma’s spokeswoman, Olena Hromnitska, repeated that the former president has said his conscience is clean.
Kuchma’s opponents have accused him of ordering Kravchenko to deal with Gongadze, who wrote about high-level corruption. The journalist was abducted off a Kiev street in 2000, and his decapitated corpse was found more than a month later.
Gongadze’s murder and the release of secret recordings in which a voice resembling Kuchma’s is heard railing against the journalist sparked massive street protests and became a rallying cry that helped unite the opposition in this ex-Soviet republic, propelling it to power last year.
President Viktor Yushchenko has said that solving Gongadze’s slaying was a matter of honour for him and his administration.
Prosecutors this week charged two former policemen with Gongadze’s murder.
“Today we can fully reconstruct the events and activities of each of the suspects,” Lutsenko was quoted as saying. ”The suspects are beginning to cooperate with the investigation.”
He also said that police officials who had information about the case are now talking.
Lutsenko said: ”They were afraid because they understood that under Kuchma, their confessions wouldn’t change anything and could even in the worst case be used against them.”
Meanwhile, Kuchma’s former Prime Minster Pavlo Lazarenko, who was convicted in the US last year of money laundering, fraud and extortion, said he was “ready to tell a lot” about Kuchma’s scandal-tainted decade in office.
